Theatrical Reenactment in Pindar and Aeschylus by Anna Uhlig (review)

Anna Uhlig’s book seeks to put Pindar and Aeschylus in conversation, specifically on the topic of performance. She argues that Pindar and Aeschylus share a conception of performance as an act that both articulates and bridges temporal and spatial disconnects between story and audience, and between composition and performance; the dual acts of articulation and bridging are simultaneous and sometimes paradoxical. The somewhat startling implication of her argument is that such a conception of performance ultimately puts Pindar and Aeschylus in company with modern theorists like Rebecca Schneider, who sees theater as a disposition that joins the “here and now” of a performance with the “theres and thens of its composition” (15), and Joseph Roach, whose focus on the central role of bodies as objects of surrogacy yields similar insights about the both disjunctive and conjunctive functions of performance.

For me, the most illuminating parts of Uhlig’s discussion are those devoted to embedded or direct speech, i.e., speech of a secondary speaker directly quoted by a primary speaker. As she demonstrates through sensitive close readings, the device allows for a blending of the primary and secondary speakers’ voices, which in turn blends the primary and embedded speakers’ respective temporal frames. Embedded speech in Pindar and Aeschylus is all the more intriguing given that most occurrences of it in their works lack an interlocutor. That is to say, direct speech tends not to be followed by a quoted response. Uhlig observes that this isolation of the embedded speaker typically reflects an asymmetrical relationship between speaker and “silent (or silenced) addressee: in Pindar, the formal imbalance of embedded speech without response is regularly mirrored by an overt imbalance in status: gods addressing mortals, or mortals beseeching gods” (34). She later makes the similar assertion that the way Pindar and Aeschylus use embedded speech “raises questions—about the nature of song, voice, identity, and time—that resist simple answers” (76). These intriguing provocations about embedded speech and identity specifically are something I would have liked to see developed further.

Uhlig’s explorations of tools, bodies, and ghost figures as similar articulations of Pindar’s and Aeschylus’ conceptions of performance also yield some interesting insights. For example, she notes the mimetic function of the aulos, whose invention on the occasion of Medusa’s death is detailed in Pindar, Pythian 12. Her discussion of the shields in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes focuses on their vocal or sonic qualities, thus complementing the visual focus of previous seminal examinations (e.g., W. G. Thalmann, Dramatic Art in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes [New Haven and London 1978]; F. I. Zeitlin, Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes [Rome 1982]). I wondered whether Uhlig’s discussion here could have been enriched by engagement with Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore 1992), which makes complementary observations about the complex blending of visual and verbal inherent in ekphrasis. Uhlig’s examination of various bodies in Pindar and Aeschylus (e.g., Orestes in Choephori, Ixion and others in Pythian 2) discusses how they call attention to the many and complex functions of actors’ bodies in a performance. The final chapter, on ghost figures in Pythian 8 and Persians, argues that such figures call similar attention to the complexities of performance.

As with any work of scholarship, individual readers will to varying degrees have their own idiosyncratic dissatisfactions; for this reader, the prose is sometimes unnecessarily dense and repetitive, and some of the diction could have been simpler. But ultimately there are a number of valuable takeaways: by treating Pindar and Aeschylus together, Uhlig accomplishes the impressive task of identifying key similarities between them, despite their more obvious and more commented upon differences of form; her work demonstrates the utility of comparison between authors as a fruitful avenue of interpretation; it prompts us to consider performance as a key concern of the poetic culture shared by these...